1. Field of Invention
In the field of input technologies of a handheld device, the present invention relates to a character input method, and more particularly to a multi-contact character input method; meanwhile, the present invention further relates to a multi-contact character input system.
2. Description of Related Arts
In recent years, various handheld devices including a cell phone are increasingly widely applied, and various necessary input manners of operating the electronic devices emerge accordingly, such as a common 9-key keyboard and a qwerty keyboard on the cell phone. Both the 9-key keyboard and the qwerty keyboard may be presented in the following two manners. One is a pressing hard keyboard, such as a qwerty keyboard on BlackBerry 8830 of RIM Company. The other one is a virtual soft keyboard on a touch screen, such as a qwerty keyboard on iPhone or other cell phones with touch screens. Some cell phones have both a hard keyboard and a virtual soft keyboard on a touch screen, such as P1i cell phone of Sony Ericsson. In addition to that the touch screen has a touch sensing function, the hard keyboard may also have the touch sensing function, for example, the A668 cell phone of Motorola adopts a touch sensing keyboard, thereby implementing a function through which a user can directly write in a keyboard area through fingers.
The functions of both the touch screen and the touch sensing keyboard can be classified into the following two kinds. One is conventional single-point touch sensing, that is, states such as contacting, moving and leaving of only one touch point can be sensed in the touch sensing area. The other one is multi-point touch sensing represented by iPhone, that is, states such as contacting, moving and leaving of one or more touch points can be sensed in the touch sensing area.
The touch sensing keyboard, the 9-key keyboard or the qwerty keyboard, on the handheld electronic device has a common defect, that is, the keys are too small and it is inconvenient to click. For example, each key on the virtual qwerty keyboard on the touch screen is small due to the limitation of the touch screen space, and if the user presses the keys through fingers not through a special stylus pen during inputting, the user should be very careful to avoid mistakes.
United State patent application 20080316183 of Apple Company: Swipe Gestures for Touch Screen Keyboard discloses a method for implementing frequently used functional keys through swipes. The method implements the frequently used functional keys or character keys such as shift (that is, an uppercase/lowercase switch during input of English characters), space, backspace (that is, deleting a previously input character), and line feed through swipes in four directions of up, down, left, and right on the virtual keyboard displayed on the touch screen. A defect of the method lies in that, when the user makes swipes in four directions of up, down, left, and right during the process of clicking the keyboard for inputting the characters, a process of mode switch is implied, that is, it is required to first switch from a click input mode to a swipe input mode and then switch back to the click input mode after the swipes, which brings inconvenience to the user.